SEO site migration checklist: move without losing rankings
A site migration is any move big enough to change your URLs: a new domain, a new platform, a switch to HTTPS, or a rebuild that reshuffles your folder structure. Done carefully, nobody notices. Done in a hurry, you watch your search traffic fall off a cliff the week after launch.
Most of the horror stories trace back to the same handful of mistakes: URLs that changed with no redirect, redirects that point at the wrong place, or a launch that nobody checked until the rankings had already dropped. This checklist walks through the whole thing in order, from the planning you do before anyone touches the live site to the checks you run for weeks afterward.
Map every old URL to a new one before you launch
The single most important thing you do in a migration is the URL map. Export a full list of your current URLs from your sitemap, your analytics, and a crawl of the live site, then add a column for where each one will live after the move. Every old URL needs a destination, even the ones you forgot existed.
Pay special attention to pages that earn traffic or have backlinks pointing at them. Those are the URLs that cost you real money if they break. Pull your top pages by traffic and your most-linked pages, and double-check that each has a sensible new home rather than getting dumped at the homepage.
Redirect old URLs with 301s
Once the map is ready, it becomes your redirect plan. Each old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new counterpart. A 301 tells search engines the move is permanent and carries nearly all of the old page's ranking strength to the new URL, which is exactly what you want.
Point each redirect straight at the final URL. It is tempting to redirect the old structure to an intermediate URL that then redirects again, especially when you are reusing rules from an earlier move, but every extra hop slows the page and bleeds a little ranking value. One old URL, one 301, one live destination.
Do not forget the supporting files
Pages are not the only thing that moves. A migration touches a lot of plumbing that is easy to overlook until something breaks.
- Update your XML sitemap to list the new URLs and submit it to search console.
- Update robots.txt so you are not accidentally blocking the new paths.
- Update internal links to point at the new URLs directly rather than relying on redirects.
- Update canonical tags so they reference the new URLs, not the old ones.
- Keep the old sitemap available for a while so search engines rediscover the moved URLs and follow the redirects.
Launch, then check immediately
The hour after launch is when problems are cheapest to fix, so check right away rather than waiting for traffic data to tell you something is wrong. Crawl the new site and confirm the important pages return 200. Run a sample of old URLs through a redirect checker and confirm each one returns a single 301 that lands on the right live page.
Watch for the classic launch-day failures: a staging-only robots.txt that blocks the whole site, redirect chains where an old URL bounces through two or three hops, and redirect loops where conflicting HTTPS and www rules send the browser in circles. A broken-link crawl will surface internal links that still point at the old structure.
Keep watching for weeks, not days
Search engines take time to recrawl a migrated site and settle on the new URLs, so a dip in the first week or two is normal and not a reason to panic. What matters is the trend over the following month. Watch your search console coverage report for a spike in 404s or crawl errors, which usually means a redirect was missed.
Set up monitoring on your highest-value URLs so a redirect that quietly fails becomes an alert instead of a slow leak you notice in next quarter's traffic report. If rankings have not recovered after a few weeks, go back to the URL map and look for pages that lost their redirect or got pointed somewhere irrelevant.
Frequently asked questions
- How long does it take to recover rankings after a migration?
- Expect a temporary dip while search engines recrawl and reindex the new URLs, often a couple of weeks. A clean migration with correct 301s usually recovers within a month or so. If traffic is still down after that, you likely have missed or misrouted redirects to chase.
- Should I redirect old URLs to the homepage if there is no exact match?
- No. Redirect each old URL to the most relevant live page instead. Sending lots of unrelated pages to the homepage looks like a soft 404 to search engines and frustrates visitors. If a page has genuinely no equivalent and no value, letting it 404 or 410 is better than a bad redirect.
- Can I migrate to a new domain and HTTPS at the same time?
- You can, but it adds risk because two changes are happening at once. If you do combine them, make sure each old URL redirects in a single 301 to its final HTTPS address on the new domain, not through an intermediate hop. Many teams prefer to split big changes into separate launches.
- How do I check my redirects are working after launch?
- Run a sample of your old URLs through a redirect checker and confirm each returns one 301 that ends on the correct live page returning 200. Then crawl the new site for broken links. Doing both straight after launch catches the most common migration failures before they cost traffic.
Related tools
Redirect Checker
Trace the full redirect chain for any old URL and confirm it lands on the right page in a single 301 hop.
Broken Link Checker
Crawl the new site after launch to catch internal links still pointing at the old URL structure.
Bulk HTTP Status Checker
Check a whole list of old and new URLs at once to verify status codes across the migration.
Related guides
Put this guide to work on your own site
Sitewell’s free tools run the exact checks covered above — no signup, results in seconds.